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About Far Cry 3: I've been playing through Blood Dragon and loving it, but I'm already starting to feel like I've seen all it has. Could anyone comment on how similar Far Cry 3 is? And is there more to the combat? I gather FC3 is bigger, which may hurt it if the game play doesn't bulk up to match. I'm only at Level 18 in Blood Dragon, and between the chain gun and explosive unlock for the sniper, I'm more or less unstoppable even on Hard mode. I think it might not be long before it's just the soundtrack(!!!) and the long-range arrow headshots that keep me giving a damn.

I'm also having a hard time imagining how the completely over the top VIDEOOOO GAAAAAAAAAAMES attitude and aesthetic running through everything would work in something that isn't a self-consciously retro-futuristic satire.

For the love of all that's holy do not stop playing this game until you reach the end. The last mission turns everything up to eleven, and my is it glorious. Seldom do I cheer aloud when gaming, but this time I certainly did.

Upgrade, kill, cnage the colour of things, become invincible, remove challenge. Those are exactly the same upgrade options offered in Saints Row III and IV, come to think of it.

I'm guessing this might be what you were implying but I feel like spelling it out either way - at least Saints Row the Third and IV consistently offered you new and/or interesting things to do with your skills/superpowers. That was the thing that got me about Far Cry 3 - I just found the world so crushingly dull. I felt liberating outposts just made the game steadily more tedious because from then on there was no tension and nothing of any import ever happened - enemies all disappeared, hunting felt pointless (in no way do you remotely need all the pouches), towns did nothing and offered nothing to look at, and I kept thinking I was being punished in some way for being good at the game (though it was hardly particularly difficult to start with). It felt like a beautiful graphics engine and some reasonably decent gunplay awkwardly draped over a dead, lifeless world that offered no real challenge, nothing to care about and had absolutely no purpose other than acting as a backdrop for this ham-fisted morality play. Horrible, horrible game, and it pretty much guaranteed I'm not touching 4 for quite some time, whenever it turns up. Black Flag pretty much flattens it in every respect, beyond automatic weapons and bad dubstep.

For the love of all that's holy do not stop playing this game until you reach the end. The last mission turns everything up to eleven, and my is it glorious. Seldom do I cheer aloud when gaming, but this time I certainly did.

I second third and fourth that.
The ending is, by all means, glorious and if you find the game to be a bit tedious, just skip everything and run for the ending. You don't really need all the upgrades and you can keep playing afterwards.

Just played FEAR: Extraction Point. While it wasn't made with the same finesse as the original game it was still an enjoyable romp, since the basic shooting gameplay is so great in itself. I took the advice of some internet person who once said that the proper way to play FEAR was to use the slo-mo as little as possible. That was a great idea; it made the firefights much more intense and panicky.

The ending was completely inexplicable, but then I gather it's not really canon? Planning on doing Perseus Mandate next, how does that fit into things?

Been playing Black Flag. Finding the piracy a bit of a grind by this point, metal and cash is rationed sufficiently slowly that I'm looking at upgrades that cost 15k and 300 metal and just groaning. Finding a ship with any metal can take forever sometimes. And I'm just not that good at boats. Like, sufficiently ungood at boats that even though I know it's meant to be easy I still go toe-to-toe with frigates and lose most of my health.

Been playing Black Flag. Finding the piracy a bit of a grind by this point, metal and cash is rationed sufficiently slowly that I'm looking at upgrades that cost 15k and 300 metal and just groaning. Finding a ship with any metal can take forever sometimes. And I'm just not that good at boats. Like, sufficiently ungood at boats that even though I know it's meant to be easy I still go toe-to-toe with frigates and lose most of my health.

Um. Apologies if this is no help but are you using heavy shot like you ought to? Just pressing right trigger or whatever the equivalent is on KB&M and not bothering to aim (aiming fires your regular round shot)? It's just I missed out on that for the longest time and it's absolutely vital to making the game as easy as possible, along with getting your mortars up as high as you can and softening enemies up from long distance first. Don't assume you have to board every ship if you're grinding for upgrades, either, unless you really need the health. If you can get the hang of the combat at all you should be able to chew through a ton of schooners and brigs in an hour's play or even half an hour, and then you should either have your metal or be able to sell off your rum and sugar for a fair amount.

On top of that Kenway's Fleet can seem tedious but it's another really easy way to pull in a hefty chunk of cash once you've got a couple of frigates to send out.

Last night I started Broken Age, played through all of Vella's story that it would seemingly allow me to before switching me over to Shay. I decided to use that as my point to stop playing for the night. I tried to switch back to Vella but she just lay there on the beach after the battle with the Mog.

So far the writing and dialogue are pretty good. It certainly has a charm about it. The art can be a bit hit and miss. There doesn't seem to be consistency between it all. Some of the characters, objects and backgrounds look better than others, like they put more effort or detail into them. At one point there's a ladder and I swear at times it looks like they just got a brown crayon to draw it in.

The mouth movement on some characters is also really weird. It's like early episodes of South Park levels of paper cut outs.

"Halo is designed to make the player think "I look like that, I am macho sitting in my undies with my xbox""

been playing a lot of them console games recently, beaten FFXIII and asura's wrath which is an absurd and amazing spectacle.

On the PC side I've been playing bunch of smaller games that came out last year
beaten brothers tale of 2 sons: An interesting game with a cool control mechanic but is rather overhyped. I found the puzzle to be very simplistic and the story very predictable. And all the emotional moment in the game feel rather forced on you. it get a 6/10 for me

Also played gun point which is a very neat little game. The author has a very interesting puzzle mechanic and execute it rather nicely, the story also has charm and humor. My only complain is the puzzle never get out there, all the solutions are obvious, this game would benefit a lot from an editor.

beaten trials evolutions. very fun game still even if it is basically the same thing since the flash game day. The forced Uplay is mostly fine except for the constant syncing with the leader board which takes 3-5 s after every round and really slow you down when you just want to restart.

Dipped my toes a little bit into EUIV today. On my way to make my home country viet nam a power house again. There're a lot of difference compare to EUIII especially on how the economy and research works so I've just been reading the change log and manual. Going to be a long process

Started Spud's Quest finally couple of days ago. Really liking it so far, only half way through the first temple. Wonder how much back-tracking there will be since the inventory slot is only 4 items and I keep on dropping stuff all the time.

Also started doing a match a day in Frozen Synapse. He is using his tablet and I am on the PC. Works like a charm. Awesome game.

I've been playing a STEP-modded Skyrim, since I never played the expansions. It's a really well crafted guide, makes the game much prettier and fixes a ton of things (but doesn't alter gameplay much). I did the foolhardy thing and just installed some 150 mods without any testing, and I was sure it wasn't going to run. But after using BOSS and TES5Edit, and fixing one mistake I'd made, it's actually running pretty flawlessly. My FPS (on a 560ti) sometimes dips below 20 but I haven't been able to determine what causes that.

As for the game itself, I was planning on doing something different this time but ended up reverting to my usual, easy, archery+sneak character. Melee is terrible, magic would probably require some extra modding to be fun, but shooting stuff with a bow is still pretty nice.

And I finished Batman: Arkham Asylum today... interesting game. Was fun. I've been waiting to play it until the stupid DRM went away and now that it has, I've been enjoying it quite a bit! Not going to do the challenges or anything, because I don't care... but one less game for me to have in the backlog! Yay!

And I finished Batman: Arkham Asylum today... interesting game. Was fun. I've been waiting to play it until the stupid DRM went away and now that it has, I've been enjoying it quite a bit! Not going to do the challenges or anything, because I don't care... but one less game for me to have in the backlog! Yay!

The story is just drivel-drivel-drivel IMO, there's this guy who keeps babbling in the background and then more guys and some gals babbling, then more of the same guy, most of them look and sound ridiculous to me, I can't really muster up enough interest to listen to whatever crap they're talking about, then again much of my goodwill was likely wasted on the mind-numbingly boring 10+ minutes long playable-cutscene intro.

Guess that makes me susceptible of being called a mainstream/Nolan batman fan, except I'm not really even a batman fan, I just happen to like some of the films that have the batman in them.

I logged some 20 hours of AA and still haven't finished it (you know me) because I played it as a 3D Mark of the Ninja / FEZ / Trine hybrid (the Trine, sorry, Scarecrow parts felt the weakest to me), my iterative/completionist approach doesn't work well with it since you can't get all the collectibles unless you've already unlocked all the toys, at the same time I didn't loathe backtracking as much as I did with, say, The Witcher, because the levels are so beautiful and atmospheric that exploring them is a pleasure (that is also very Trine-y) and also it felt like a treasure hunt, the macguffin itself is not the point (and of course you can't make me care one bit about the backstory of some inanely uninteresting sidekick of a totally ridiculous supervillain, or some slow speaking Arkham guy, it's just noise in the background), the hunt itself is the point (FEZ understands this perfectly)

As for the dance/fight mechanic, well it looks good on-screen but even the much simpler execution mechanic of MotN felt more pleasurable, which prompts the thought that AA is a collection of systems that could be games on their own, but since they aren't, they aren't well developed enough to be interesting, ending up to be ...filler. Competently delivered filler, but still failing to hit the spot, gelling together just enough and mainly because of the package that holds them in place.

I should probably finish the main story (cross one off the backlog and all that), but that leads my mind to AC. There's probably more of that good stuff that I liked, and a whole lot more of that uninteresting fluff. Well, at least now, I'd walk in with more awareness and maybe be able to get more (and more eclectical) enjoyment out of it.